Another submission... Stay a while... stay forever.
This is another port of an old Atari and C64 game (and other platforms from the eighties), Squish'Em (AKA Squish'em Sam).
This project is almost at beta stage, all the sprites, logic and levels are in. 95% of the sfx/music is done.
In my todo list I have a bunch of ideas to juice the game up and add a bunch of new stuff to this classic game.
The current state of the port is quite faithful to the original apart from a very different way of managing player deaths. In the original game when the player is hit by a falling hazard or when colliding with an enemy, then the game restarts at a near level position after a brief cutscene where the player falls down the building. I hate this and decided to be creative and modern. In my port, the player loses a life when hit and turns invincible for a couple of seconds without breaks. Another small change I made is at level 16 which is one of the last levels with randomized enemies which also move faster than normal. In my port the game is endless after level 16 with enemies having increasing moving speed and shorter respawn times.
Things to do next before entering beta state:
- finish sounds (player collision, hazard dropping, new level, 1up picked up
- finish end of building animation
- add an attract screen
- improve title screen (as we used to have in the eighties...)
Things to do at beta:
- improve animation and sprites
- bug hunt
Things to do after 1.0:
- add more content (multiple paths like Crazy Climber does, add power ups, player like enemies)
- juice the game up (with particles, screen shake, sprite flash, more animation frames, parallax background, etc.)
- add leaderboard (when websockets are live...)
Acknowledgments:
kikito for his awesome libraries
washburnello for his amazing work on a lot of small and big libraries for picotron (I'm using your debug lib with a couple of changes)
Edit: 2025-10-17
- added hazard, new level, pickup sounds
Thanks for sharing this! The controls and gameplay feel very appropriately Atari/C64 to me, even though I have not played many original games on these system.
Thanks for your comment, it made me come back to finish this port!
Yeah, the controls are as clunky as they made it in the eighties (with obvious exceptions)... I won't bother trying the original but if you're really curious you can play the C64 version online here.
I have some ideas for a more modern movement style which I could include in a "modern" play mode.
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